Get ‘Em While They’re Soft

Cicadas are a low-carb, low-fat rare treat apparently best served sauteed in butter and parsley. Some, however, prefer to go more upscale:

The soft-shelled cicada, it’s done just like a soft-shelled crab,” says executive chef Frank Belosic, describing how freshly molted cicadas should be rolled in flour, pan-fried in olive oil, and finished with a sauce of white wine, butter and shallots.

Last chance to get them fresh for 17 years.

Periodical cicadas achieve astounding population densities, as high as 1.5 million per acre (Dybas 1969). Densities of tens to hundreds of thousands per acre are more common, but even this is far beyond the natural abundance of most other cicada species. Apparently because of their long life cycles and synchronous emergences, periodical cicadas escape natural population control by predators, even though everything from birds to spiders to snakes to dogs eat them opportunistically when they do appear. Magicicada population densities are so high that predators apparently eat their fill without significantly reducing the population (a phenomenon called “predator satiation”), and the predator populations cannot build up in response because the cicadas are available as food above ground only once every 13 or 17 years.

Of course, if you’re too lazy to collect them yourself, GrubCo sells tasty insects in bulk.